> That's just your choice of how to build your app, right? You could've avoided this by rendering templates on the server and sending static HTML to the client, keeping the business logic on the server.

Exactly. This way of working is such a breeze. PHP does the logic, the state is firmly in the database, and I'm from a time when peopling talking "frontend" meant HTML and CSS. Occasionally some plain JS, and I'm good.

Years ago I was out of the webdev field for some time, and I must admit that HTML and CSS alone have made big strides.